


hello/goodbye

by jdphoenix



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Canon Relationships, Episode: s03e05 4722 Hours, F/M, Season/Series 05, Time Travel Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-11
Updated: 2018-01-11
Packaged: 2019-03-03 09:33:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13338441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jdphoenix/pseuds/jdphoenix
Summary: Without access to an Infinity Stone time travel is an imprecise process.





	hello/goodbye

**Author's Note:**

> Over on tumblr lillysbitchfest prompted "first kiss" for Jemma/Will. I may have gone a little overboard with it.

“Without access to an Infinity Stone time travel is an imprecise process,” Enoch says. Jemma shoots Fitz a look; he seems as in the dark as she is about how that would make any difference.

“So we’re just gonna fling ourselves back in time willy-nilly,” Daisy says. It’s not a question because at this point it’s fairly obvious that _is_ Fitz and Enoch’s plan for getting them home.

Fitz presses Jemma’s tracker into her hand, his fingers lingering on her palm. “We’ll each be sent back individually, allowing us to land in different time periods, and Enoch will use the data the trackers collect to adjust our trajectory to get us to our own time.”

“So willy-nilly,” Daisy repeats.

“Yes,” Jemma says before Fitz can answer. She bites down on a smile while strapping the tracker on her wrist. “But following that Enoch will be able to send us home.”

“Eventually,” Enoch says, still tapping away at his ship’s computer. “It would be wise, when you land, to keep yourselves out of sight.”

“You planning on dropping us into trouble?” Coulson asks.

“No, but should you land in time periods in which you already exist, your past selves will act as magnets, pulling you in.” Now he does turn, just far enough to pin Coulson with a quizzical stare. “You do not strike me as the sort of people to take such an arrival well.”

As he’s probably right, none of them argues.

“There’s also no telling how long you will remain whenever you land and there will likely be some temporal instability.”

“Meaning what?” Mack asks, sounding wary.

“Meaning we’ll bounce around a little,” Fitz says. “You might land at 11:45 on March third and a few seconds later it’ll be 1:02 on the same day.”

“Your trackers should warn you of impending jumps, however,” Enoch says with what must be his attempt at a pleasant smile. Really, how many eons has he been living among humanity and he still can’t manage a convincing smile?

“I feel so reassured,” Elena says, nearly too softly to be heard.

“So try not to be seen appearing and disappearing when we have no control over where or when,” May mutters. “Are we sure this is our best plan?”

Jemma keeps silent while she tightens the strap on her tracker, securing it to her wrist, but honestly she agrees with May. There must be a better method of returning to their own time. Have they really ruled out the monolith as a possibility?

“One last thing,” Enoch says, “you must not interfere in the events in which you land, no matter how much you might want to. We are already creating one fissure in the time stream by attempting to stop the Earth’s destruction and there is no telling the damage that might be caused by the birth of yet another alternate timeline.”

“You worried we’re gonna break _time_?” Daisy asks.

“No. But I do not envy my alternate selves having to do all of this all over again.” Before any of them can find an answer for that, he presses a button. The trackers on their arms all begin to beep and in the time it takes Jemma to look down at hers, her vision has already whited out.

 

 

\-------

 

 

It’s dark where—when—she lands. Dirt beneath her hands, dry air, and a smell…

She freezes in the dark.

She knows that smell.

It’s like nothing on Earth—because it isn’t Earth. It’s the smell of Maveth. Desert and isolation and endless twilight.

She pushes herself up on shaking hands and knees. She’s in the caves and her past self is sleeping uncomfortably not ten feet away in a cage meant for a monster.

“What. The hell.” A clatter sounds, something round and metal landing unevenly on the floor, but it’s the voice that gets her attention. It’s like something out of a dream.

Will stands in the shadows, his machete catching the meager light coming down the corridor. It should be frightening—and it is, on some level—but that’s _Will_ , alive and real and breathing.

She’s on her feet before she knows she means to stand. He steps back, bracing his stance.

“Who-”

She puts a finger to her lips, silencing him. Her past self shifts but doesn’t wake up. Good. She doesn’t know how she would explain her presence here to herself; if she disappears quickly enough, Will at least might be convinced she was nothing but one of Hive’s hallucinations.

But that thought sits poorly with her, unsettling her stomach so that she feels she might have left a bit of it back in the future. She moves, giving Will as wide a berth as she’s able, and stepping into the corridor with him.

He looks from her back to herself, his eyes going wider the longer he looks between them. Something in his grip on the machete shifts, his weight switches to his opposite foot and he puts himself in a position to protect her younger self. She can’t help but smile, even while unsure of her very existence and keeping her in a cage he sought to keep her safe.

“I-” She doesn’t know what to say. She’s thought a thousand times of what she would say to Will if she could see him again but it was never this Will or these circumstances.

“What are you?” he asks, lifting his arm. But not, she notes, as high as he should even short an opponent as she is.

“Oh!” she gasps, careful to keep her voice soft lest she wake herself. “You’re hurt!” There’s blood staining his arm, dripping from a very poorly wrapped bandage.

“I’m- wait!” She’s already past him, heading for the first aid kit she knows is hidden away deeper in the caves.

It doesn’t occur to her until she’s done it that she shouldn’t turn her back on him, but as his angry footsteps draw nearer she doesn’t consider turning. She trusts Will not to harm her, even when he doesn’t trust her.

Those thoughts fly right out of her head when she steps into what was once and will one day soon become her home. The rickety table where she and Will talked, the outdated computers standing like some ancient monolith, the helmet propped up as a mirror. Her lungs twist around her heart.

The machete pokes at her ribs. Not painfully, not threatening, just … prodding. He’s checking to see if she’s real. “What are you?” he asks again.

She turns to face him, the machete falling away as she does lest it harm her, and for a moment she can’t breathe. It’s the first real and proper look she’s had at him and- god, she loves him. Still. Always. She’s engaged to Fitz and she’s happy to be, eager to wear his ring and be his wife and begin their life together, but there will always be a part of her heart that will live in these caves with this man.

She draws a shaky breath. “First thing’s first,” she says, forcing a light tone. And then she slaps him.

Not hard, but enough he feels it. His head turns slightly and his eyes widen a bit. She’s taken him by surprise.

He works his jaw gingerly. “So. I guess you’re real.”

She smiles. “Remember that later.”

She takes the opportunity of his confusion to grab the first aid kit and the lone chair—as she’s still in the cage, he hasn’t bothered to set another one at the table yet—and move them to his cot. “Sit,” she orders.

He doesn’t, instead opting to come close enough to study her. “So what’s the other one?”

She folds her hands over the top of the kit. “If you let me look at that arm, I’ll explain.”

She shouldn’t. She doesn’t know why she even offered. But sitting here in this place, in the presence of the man who died to save her, she can’t stand the idea of giving him anything short of the truth. He deserves that, if not for what he sacrificed for her then for the fourteen years he’s spent questioning his own sanity.

He sits. Reluctantly. His annoyance and uncertainty so familiar to her that she’s hit with a pang of nostalgia right in her breast.

“Let me see,” she says, words aimed at the kit she’s digging in rather than him. By the time she’s regained sufficient mastery of herself to look up, he’s undone the bandage and sits with his arm oriented in her direction. The machete is also pointed at her, but she pays little mind to that.

It’s a clean cut, will only take a couple of stitches. It’s only it’s awkward placement so high on his arm and so far back that’s prevented him doing so himself.

“What happened? You never told me…” She bites her lip. She means that he never, in their future together, mentioned being injured while he kept her in the cage but if he realizes she’s talking about anything other than the last few minutes, he says nothing.

“That … _thing_. I think it got angry I took its new toy.”

She meets his eyes, thinking of the Hive she met later, the perverse glee on his face while he taunted her with a dead man’s words. She thinks he’s right.

“Now what about you? Both of you?”

Right. That. “Do you have anything to bite down on?” she asks, knowing perfectly well that while he does, he won’t.

“Don’t change the subject.”

She pushes the needle into his skin a little more forcefully than is necessary. “She’s as real as I am. In a year or two—or several,” she adds, thinking of the decades between now and that last moment on Enoch’s ship, “she’ll be me. And I was her.”

Will waits until she’s tightening the last of the stitches to ask, “You traveled through _time_?”

She scowls at him. “We’re on an alien planet.”

He sighs, shaking his head to himself in that way he so often did when he thought she was being annoying. And adorable. He confessed that fact to her late one night, very near to her last on Maveth and she laughed and told him she’d never let him forget it.

She busies her hands with setting the kit to rights. There are no proper bandages left after all these years and she knows cloth is a finite resource, so she pulls the bandanna from her neck and wraps it around his arm. It’s hardly clean—the Lighthouse didn’t have much in the way of sanitation—but it will be better than anything he can scrounge up from his scraps.

“So that means … in the future, you …” He looks over his shoulder to the cavern leading to the cage. “Why would you come _here_?”

“It wasn’t intentional,” she says honestly. “And I’ll be leaving again shortly. Or I should.” She really should have asked Enoch how _long_ she should expect to stay in this time. She glances at her tracker. It blinks lazily up at her, unconcerned to have dropped her in the location of most of her nightmares. And a great many of her happiest dreams.

She looks to Will again. He’s still trying to puzzle this out, giving her time to study him. Was he always so thin? So pale? Her strong, brave Will is really quite fragile, isn’t he? Fourteen years he’s been eking out an existence here. Alone. He’s a survivor.

And then she comes along to ruin it all.

She leans forward, her hand on his catching his attention as fully as a loaded gun might. “I have to tell you-”

“No,” he says. “Whatever you’re gonna say-” he looks her up and down- “it’ll change the future.”

“Good!” It _should_ change. The entire point of all of this is to change it, to save the world. What’s saving one good man on top of that? Who can really say that’s wrong?

As if in answer, the tracker on her wrist beeps.

“No.” She needs more time. Just a little more to warn him.

He pushes her hand into her lap. She has half a moment to wonder if throwing her arms around him now might allow him to accompany her. But her vision is already tunneling and though she sees his mouth form words, she doesn’t hear his goodbye.

 

 

\-------

 

 

She’s sitting down. Her breath comes in near hyperventilated bursts. She failed. Will was there, _right there_ , and she couldn’t save him. Again.

She’s so caught up in grief that she doesn’t realize she’s sitting in the exact same chair as before.

“Seriously?”

She whirls to her feet, finds Will half-frozen in the process of setting a blanket over her past self.

“You came back?” he sounds so disbelieving, as if it’s absurd anyone would ever want to come back to this place. He’s not wrong, of course.

“He-” She looks around, struggles to find her bearings. There are maps and rows of calculations strewn across the table. She’s in the process of tracking the next portal opening. “He said we might bounce around.”

“Fitz?”

The question is so immediate she feels a jolt of guilt, though she couldn’t say why.

He shakes his head, again in that half-annoyed, half-fond way, and remains hovering over her past self. Jemma angles her head to better see what he’s about, then realizes he’s removing her necklace for her.

“Oh,” she gasps before she can help herself.

Will stills, looking to her.

“May I?” she asks, reaching for the necklace.

He hesitates but brings it to her. She thinks he might be purposefully putting distance between their conversation and her past self—for which she doesn’t blame him; she _was_ instructed to avoid all interaction with people in the past—but she’s too arrested by the sight of her necklace to care.

“It was my grandmother’s, did I ever tell you that?” She holds it up, watching the familiar play of light off its curving surface.

“Yeah,” he says, his voice oddly rough. She can imagine why.

“I lost it. The same day I lost-”

Her arms fall as she looks to Will, reality crashing on her once more. She’s talking to a ghost.

He takes the necklace from her and moves to lay it where she always did on the crate acting as a nightstand. “We’re not gonna do this.”

“You’re going to _die_ ,” she says tightly, acutely aware of her own presence and the need to keep quiet. She wants to hit him, to grab him and shake him and tell him about every night she cried herself to sleep without him. 

Will nods slowly, not nearly as shaken by the news as he should be.

“It’s going to kill you,” she says, half a challenge.

His mouth thins into something like a smile. “Yeah, I always kinda figured.”

For a moment she can only stare. “What is _wrong_ with you?” Was he always like this and she simply missed it? She knew he’d given up hope before she came and he always carried that last bullet, but this is…

Her other self moves in her sleep, curling into the blanket Will laid over her. He glances at her quickly, checking she still sleeps peacefully, then hurries to Jemma’s side. “You’re _alive_. In whatever future you come from, I’m dead and you’re alive and to me that sounds like a damn good deal.”

“Don’t I get a say in this?”

He stiffens, holding her stare for long seconds. “No.”

Bastard.

“Don’t you want to make it home? See Earth again? See your parents?”

“Yeah, of course. But I’m not gonna risk that me living means you don’t.”

She could kill him herself, she swears she could.

He takes her by the shoulder. “I’m okay with this, Jemma. I really am.”

She laughs, a harsh breath of sound that hurts as it tears up her throat. “I know. He told me.”

His hand twitches. “Who?”

“ _It_. Did you think it would only kill you? It’s going to take your body, your memories, your-”

His hand tightens enough to be painful. “Did it hurt you?”

She’s too shocked to answer. She’s never seen Will like this, his eyes wild with barely leashed fear.

“Jemma! Is it going to hurt you?”

She wants to reassure him. But she wants him alive more. “Can you imagine what it was like? Hearing your voice, your words? Spoken by that _monster_?”

He stumbles back, falling into the chair she landed in. “I’m sorry.”

She goes to her knees beside him, takes his hand. “It isn’t your fault.” She’d like to tell him she doesn’t and never has blamed him—he _saved her life_ , how could she fault him for that—but there’s more important things that need to be said. “But _please_ , Will. Can’t you at least try to live? For me?”

He brushes his fingers through the hair at her temple. They’re just as gentle as she remembers. “I can’t risk your life.”

A sob catches in her throat. She stands to pace away because she can’t not.

“You said yourself you’re just here by accident; you didn’t come back in time to save me. So you don’t know what’ll happen. I won’t take that chance, Jemma.”

He is _infuriating_.

“Just … just let me go.”

She stops her pacing, arrested by the memory of those words.

“Be happy with Fitz. Live your life. It’s okay. Really.”

“I love you.” She turns in time to see his expression. It’s some odd mix of being punched in the gut and finding out Christmas has come without his noticing. “And I was too bloody stupid to say it while I had the chance. And then that thing stole you from me. And you think that can _ever_ be okay?”

She’s moved on. She’s living her life and she’s happy—or she will be once she leaves that horrid future behind for good—and she wouldn’t change it, she really wouldn’t. Except for that one little detail where this man who quite literally meant the world to her isn’t in it.

“Jemma-”

She rushes him, taking his face in her hands and kissing him hard before he can push her off. In some ways it’s just like the first time—that other first time now, her first but not his—with her desperate and all his restraint crumbling away. She pours two years of heartache into the kiss and he meets her with months of pent up frustrations and desire.

When she finally pulls back, he holds her close, his forehead resting against hers and his breath falling in labored pants against her cheeks and neck.

“These chairs aren’t really built for two,” he says.

She giggles. She’s heard him say that before.

“Will-”

Her tracker beeps.

“No!” she demands as if saying it will stop her being pulled back.

Will stands, pushing her away. “Time to go.”

But Jemma’s not paying attention to him. Over his shoulder she sees herself, sitting up on the cot, watching everything. How long has she been listening? Long enough?

“The day the sun rises,” Jemma says, looking back to Will before he can realize anything’s changed. “Don’t leave me. Promise me, Will.”

He smiles sadly as Maveth begins to fade from her view.

 

 

\-------

 

 

She’s in a corridor. Walls made of metal. The others arranged around her, all breathing heavily.

“Everyone here?” Coulson asks.

Jemma looks around. Dimly she recognizes the architecture as matching the Lighthouse, but her focus is on the people gathered around her. The team, still filthy from their future adventures, as well as Hunter emerging from a hallway followed by a wary woman and child.

“I see you were successful.” Enoch is behind her, calm and composed as he ever was.

There’s no one else.

“Jemma?” Fitz asks. She steps into his arms, holding him tight. The pain she feels is familiar, she knows how to live through it.

 

 

\-------

 

 

In that same corridor, in that same moment, but in an entirely different place and time Jemma takes a deep, steadying breath. She’s home. Or at least the others are here as well and this doesn’t appear to be the ruins of humanity’s last outpost. It’s good enough.

“I see you were successful,” Enoch says. He’s standing at the far end of the corridor, calm and collected as ever.

Rough fingers lace with Jemma’s and she looks up into Will’s face. “You broke the rules,” he teases softly while around them the others regroup after their own adventures in time.

“Well seeing as I’d already broken the rules by speaking to you and being seen by myself, I couldn’t very well _not_ do it this time, now could I?” She thumbs the metal band on his third finger. “When did you end up?”

He kisses her quick. “Sometime in the future.”

“After the disaster?” Her pulse quickens, thinking of Will lost in another wasteland.

He smiles and pulls her into his side to kiss her again. “I’ll tell you about it later. Mom.”

He’s joking. He must be because any future he saw couldn’t have included them because neither of them had lived through the future they just came from. Of course they’re both here now, aren’t they? And she does remember herself on Maveth. So perhaps…

She rests her head against his chest as Coulson starts pulling them back together to talk about the still outstanding problem of saving the world. Perhaps the future isn’t so grim as it seems.

 


End file.
